With love,
Lizzie
* * *
Quotations from H.’s letters. In Oaxtepec they are in a huge government resort, worker’s vacations, national sports events and so on are held there. The Experiment has a floor.
“I arrived in Oaxtepec today. The hotel is beautiful but very touristy. There are 13 swimming pools. All that kind of garbage … Getting here was awful. We had a 5 hr. bus ride to Nuevo Laredo, a border town. 5 hour wait in the heat, then a 27 hr. train ride. I am having a great time. I went swimming instead of eating breakfast. We sleep in a big dormitory with about 20 girls. Mexico is beautiful and very poor. My hands are very sore from carrying our bags. As they say we are not here to be pampered.”
* * *
2nd letter:
“We have 6 hours of classes a day. My first teacher was very strict. He is nice out of class. The teacher I have now is really nice. I don’t really like my group leader, nice but a little stupid. She looks like a Salvation Army woman. She wants me to read some chapters in a book and make a report. Don’t think I will. Too nice a day. The kids are nice, but a little conventional. Oaxtepec is really gross! So touristy. We had a group of athletes here and now a religious group. I am having a wonderful time and hopefully learning some Spanish … Mexico is nice, but I like the USA. More freedom. You can wear what you want. In our families we will have to wear dresses, probably shoes and nylons. I prefer my way of life. Why shouldn’t I. I haven’t been able to get too many American newspapers and so you kind of forget all the bad things. Adios.”
(By the time this reaches you, she will be at her homestay. I hope they aren’t too “conventional.”)
* * *
Did I tell you H. had lost 12 pounds before she left home and looked beautiful? I’ll take some photos in Connecticut and send them to you.
Again, much love and good wishes to you,
E.
164. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 3, 1971
Dearest Lizzie:
It’s hard to believe letters cross the Atlantic in less than the months of the old ships at sea in the nineteenth century. It does something to smother expression maybe. Or is it that I feel you would not/ much welcome details of my daily life? Not that we have drama. I’ve been mostly settling in, and am now fairly at ease and glad to be/ out of the press and smother of London. It’s easy to go there, but the call isn’t strong this summer. And summer so queer and cool and short. The children’s school ends the sixth of July and begins the sixth of September. Another reason to be here instead of a[n] interrupted almost ten months in London.
Events—this morning two swallows flew in my window and out … those old friends who used to scare me into my old barn. I have a rabbit who dogs me around the house, and can’t be housebroken. I’ve just corrected a thirty-five page interview for a little magazine called The Review.142 It’s mostly shop, though we took care not to repeat Seidel’s old one.143 It seems double its ten years or so ago, I’m very valetudinarian, free with the my/ wisdom of age. Last weekend, separately Bob Silvers and McCarthy were here, Gene rather pricking up his ears toward campaigning, or backing someone. Bob told me about your letters from Harriet. I rub my eyes—suddenly from cats and pigs to full adolescence. Liked particularly the garbage and newspaper bits. I had one lovely card/ from her before she left—tender and gracefully humorous.144 We hardly bring out the most severe and ideological in one another, tho I write her like another grown-up—almost. Funny, just yesterday, I took Villette out of the bookcase—and put it her back. I’m deep in Dombey145—almost to where I left off in Maine four summers ago. I am terribly proud of Harriet—the flower has come to her, about five years earlier than anything came to me. Whatever else, she won’t be a wooden lady.
Bob brought your Sylvia—dazzling, as usual. In a way I want to see it in contrast with your book’s other heroines—you feel strong attraction, strong repulsion disgust/. Daddy146 is too much for me, and I think it [is] weakened by being too much Sylvia—Oh stridently! Some of her/ new poems (not the intermediate book) but more Ariel147 are terrific—one on unfaith. Remember how Dr. Eissler said Freud shifted transferred/ from the benign Joseph to the far more dangerous Moses?148 Don’t.
Love,
Cal
165. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[Castine, Maine]
August 12, 1971
Dearest Cal: Yes, letters are strange. There is no answering in the true sense in our correspondence, since no answer or information is called for. There is just writing a letter. Yes, I did mind hearing about your daily life, but I don’t much any longer. Actually I am at last glad that you are so happy, have found exactly how and where you want to live. Kent sounds lovely and the fantastic, extraordinary life one has with a new baby, all the dream-like, peculiar new rhythms—that should be much easier for you and Caroline in the country.
I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments lived before, maybe long ago by someone else. I will be going to get Harriet in about a week and so if you want to write one or both send it to 67th Street. I will write you all about her just as soon as I see the beloved girl. Only going to the airport to meet you could compare with the emotion I feel about re-uniting with our daughter. But, honey, we don’t talk “ideology!” as you sometimes seem to think; we laugh and gossip about people and experiences not at all about politics! There are no “politics” around anyway; nothing much is happening. I forgot to tell you Harriet wanted the 25 pounds you sent her used for the East Bengalis. She had just read something about them in the paper and her eyes were tearing. I said, “It will just go down the drain.” Later in the day she came to me and said, “Yes it will go down the drain. But spending it at Bloomingdale’s is down the drain, too.” And so I sent the money.
I am not a law-giver (your little admonition about shifting from the “benign Joseph” to the “dangerous Moses.” I agree with that.)149 It’s funny about my piece on Sylvia Plath. Most of the letters I have had speak of my/ “compassion” and actually I don’t quite feel that for her. I find her very unattractive as a woman, so hard and cruel, with herself and with others. I dislike “Daddy” intensely (I compare it with “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms”) and also “Lady Lazarus.”150 But so much else is fantastically beautiful, isn’t it.… I have a sort of trembling, sick feeling when I think of the fall coming up. I have been asked to speak at various places, to write things and of course I want to do so, but I feel so inadequate and so pressed for time. “Little” essays take me such a bloody long span to write.
Ah, well, darling Hannah was over for a drink yesterday and I was playing lieder, this time your old Schwarzkopf record, which has been through many a scene of your life, and she became very happy in a strange agitated way, listening to An die Musik, Gretchen, etc.151 I suppose it was the German. Suddenly I felt close to her for the first time in my life. She is happy here, Mary and Jim are well. I have given Tommy152 your address and he will be writing you. Bill Alfred is going to Ireland in Sept., paid for by PEN club and I will also give him Kent, with phone number, etc. Gene McCarthy—I don’t think he can rally any forces. It will be interesting to see … You know, Sarah Orne Jewett is wonderful. I am doing a sort of Maine thing153—“creative”—using my old notes. I began to look at her stories and they are stunning.
“A man ought to provide for his folks he’s got to leave behind him. ‘Be just before you are generous:’ that’s what was always set for the B’s in the copy-books.”
* * *
“‘As for man, his days are as grass’ that was for A—the two go well together … My good gracious, ain’t this a starved-looking place? It makes me ache to think them/ nice Bray girls has to brook it here.”154
For some reason I am immensely mov
ed by that use of “brook.”155
I had been hoping for a letter from Harriet today, but I probably will have to be satisfied with the two I quoted you. In Mexico I think they sort of throw away the mail, South American fashion. I did have a card from Jean Valentine and so I hope that means she’s all right. As I got to know her better last winter I saw how unbearably hard life is for her at times and how she won’t or can’t accept help. There are weeks when you call, no answer even though you know she’s there; or at 6 p.m. the children say she is sleeping. Then it passes, but one worries and yet there is nothing you can do except let her know you’re there, not so many blocks away, if needed. We made a wonderful friend, both of us, in a student Jean had at Barnard when she had my course last fall and I had in the spring. I know how one treasures these students when they are right, witty, smart, nice. This one, Mary Gordon was also much liked by Harriet and now the girl is going off to Syracuse to study with Snodgrass. She told me she and her boy friend used to walk up 67th Street, sighing, “He lives there!” You, of course … Barbara told me Phyllis Seidel had been disturbed this summer. Strange, she called me often and would ask me to dinner parties; when Jonathan was here I had her at a little dinner I gave. All these last years she has seemed beautiful, busy, very much on top of things, quite dismissing about Fred, indifferent.156 And then, or so I gather, everything sort of flooded over her and broke and it turned out she had very complex and hurting feelings still. She’s all right now, and I will call her when I get to New York. I feel like the voracious Lillian Hellman with my “young” friends; but these aren’t things I pursue. They just happen. The only thing I can see that has come from Women’s Lib is that women seem more able to lean on each other, be free to. The rest is bad writing, bald simplicity and simple-mindedness, or usually. I look forward to New York, shameless urbanite that I continue to be, even edging the grave. I will see Bob on the 23rd for dinner. He gave a nice account of you and Caroline. He had or has—don’t know—a new “Lady”157 someone to while away the hours, or are they minutes, that he can spare from the never sleeping Review. Goodbye Lizzie/
166. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
[Robert Lowell|15 West 67 St|Milgate Park, Bearsted,
Maidstone, Kent]
August 18, 1971
Dearest Lizzie:
May I say it? The last is the sweetest of your letters—only one crack. How could you compare my gentle Flaubertian elegy on my father to Daddy? Oh how I too wish that in some turning of time and doubling of matter you might be meeting my plane in New York this late summer. I don’t see how I will get to America sooner than Christmas or Easter. The date of the child’s (Lowell-Guinness, I’ve been holding this back from you) [birth] is little more than six weeks off. Yes, the country is already much better for/ the children, and will be for the next one’s entrance. They have so much more at their age to do distract them—much/ most of it will last through winter: indoor swimming (at an awful country hotel, The Great Dane)[,] various horse things, and even ballet, and mostly running about the house, indoors and out. Pets go on snowballing, Bosun, a miniature, long-haired dachshund, liable to be eaten by the cats, Tigger and Kitty—and Goldie and Carpie, liable to be eaten by everyone. Oh this is like one of Harriet’s old letters.
Guests pile in—the Empsons, Sonia, and now perhaps Alice.158 I don’t think McCarthy is doing much—that makes him refreshing after the other polls. Sorry about Phyllis. Fred was here last fall—much better than the Humphrey evening,159 but rather too torpedoeing around town. Could he be called a snob, but then an intelligence?/ Everyone knows the name and frame of Bob’s Lady romance, but no one has seen them together. When he came, I’m sure all three of us felt scared and embarrassed, it went off with kindness, awe, and even much humor. He’s been a friend. Sorry too about Jean V. It was the same last year. It seems rapid to say think/ she must be tough in her weakness. Give her my Love. Your book seems a big thing: a more passionate, personal style, Woman, a subject hardly un/touched in our time by anyone of critical and literary vocation. Are [you] going to use any of your old women pieces, particularly Emily Brontë,160 and maybe La Deuxieme?161 You’ve given that this/ out of the way subject quite a little time. The one advantage I find in Woman’s Lib is that I can start off humorous or angry argument with any woman. Last winter, a Lady Norwich stopped speaking to me with the furious remark, “I have as much right as a man to crank a car.” I said I had always prayed for such a woman.162 I’m very low. I163
How co/164
167. Robert Lowell to Miss Harriet Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
August 18, 1971
Dearest Harriet:
If you’d write me oftener, I’d write you oftener. However, mother told me about two of your letters, the “thirteen swimming pool hotel” and “such garbage” and about your preferring America to Mexico because you hadn’t “read many American papers lately.” Well, now you are home to and with/ the papers. Three come to us at breakfast (over my dead body) one, even flatter than the New York Times, the/ London Times, one easier to read but irritatingly conservative, and one much more violently conservative, and constantly smoking into editorials calling for reform of the young and Irish Catholics/—each issue of this paper is gayed up with photos of four new half naked girls with considerable figures.
I hope you have a lot of Spanish. And it gives me pride to hear that you have serious thoughts/ about life and education. Does it spoil it all for me to say so? None of us do what we might; that’s almost a definition of life. How many though thicken their minds and tear the nerves to tatters when they might not/ have? Have you met met more silly grown-ups or more silly persons roughly your own age. I’ve met find/ more grown-ups/, but then I see more.
I intended to write you about our pets. They increase at the rate of one a week. Last one, a wooly miniature dachshund. It made our most terrifying cat, Tigger the killer of voles, almost jump threw165 a window. Now Tigger and Kitty and an Irish terrorist cat, Kelly, have drawn the outline of a dog on the flint of the driveway, and then jump for its throat.
I am glad you gave the twenty-five pounds to East Pakistan—one of the few issues like Biaffra, where there’s only one right side.
Goodbye and love,
Daddy
168. Robert Lowell to Mrs. Robert Lowell
Milgate Park, Bearsted, Maidstone, Kent
September 2, 1971
Dearest Lizzie:
We’ve had two weeks much like the famous Brooks’ summer in Castine. And hanging over the clouds, the birth, now little less than a month off? No troubles, but frightening at best. The other day we went to a vulgar new movie of Wuthering Heights.166 I had forgotten the plot.
Alice has just left from a swift over-night visit. She had rhapsodic pictures of you and H. You seemed to be growing more than Harriet. Indeed Harriet had lost weight. Do you think Harriet would like to come here for Easter vacation. Things could be split between here and London, maybe more of London, she is young to retire. I’d like her to see the other children—the oldest thinks of her as a model, but is more involved with pets than politics. And the new child, involved too./
Maybe because Alice left rather early in the morning for her plane, the moment was melancholy. I’ve known her since four, but somehow it’s the more recent years that flash and trouble my immediate vision of her—drives with Everard etc. to Mount Desert lakes, the Boston Hospital. We don’t get younger, tho you may. She is over the excited stage about her divorce, can’t regret Everard, but a little sad with her outlook. Very sweet.
You see, I have nothing to write, but wished you to know I was thinking of both of you this Maine morning. I think Bill Alfred is coming in [a] few days.
Love,
Cal
* * *
(I do hope your hip has healed—what I meant to say, but the letter was sealed.)167
169. Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell
[15 West 67th Str
eet, New York, N.Y.]
September 21, 1971
Dear Cal: I have seen my lawyer, Mrs. Barbara Zinsser, and she will be writing you about my intention to start divorce proceedings.
I have never tried to deny my grief and pain and my love for you. For me at least the amputation will probably always hurt, but I am resigned to that. The recent shocks have added something new. I don’t know what to call it—the intolerable, I guess. All the more sad in that there is in what you plan to do no element of necessity.
About Harriet. She finds it hard to write you, anyone. I got only two letters this summer and she said she wrote one to you. However, so many people speak of letters returned, months later, from all your old London addresses. Harriet is definitely not up to handling her feelings about all of this. She just turns off, naturally. I hope you will set up some sort of regularity and your own relationship, writing at set intervals, cards, even a monthly telephone call. She is a child and the relationship cannot be on a reciprocal basis with you any more than it can with me. We talk of you occasionally, but only in friendly, smiling terms. We were remembering the other night those freezing mornings in Spain and your inevitable cry of disappointment when, instead of orange juice and a freshly boiled egg, you got a tepid bottled orange soda with a raw egg floating in it. Actually my own memory of you is of/ about 15 years ago. You and Harriet are on your own now, with your own arrangements and relationships to make.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 Page 23
